By Ted Koppel
The Washington Post
The Washington Post
Sunday, November 14, 2010;
To witness Keith Olbermann - the most opinionated among MSNBC's left-leaning, Fox-baiting, money-generating hosts - suspended even briefly
last week for making financial contributions to Democratic political
candidates seemed like a whimsical, arcane holdover from a long-gone era
of television journalism, when the networks considered the collection
and dissemination of substantive and unbiased news to be a public trust.
Back then, a policy against political contributions would have aimed to
avoid even the appearance of partisanship. But today, when Olbermann
draws more than 1 million like-minded viewers to his program every night
precisely because he is avowedly, unabashedly and monotonously
partisan, it is not clear what misdemeanor his donations constituted.
Consistency?
We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck,
Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin
pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by
their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and
commentary is highly profitable.
The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of
nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic
of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to
confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is,
though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan's oft-quoted observation that "everyone is
entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts," seems almost quaint
in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.
And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding
fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning,
perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is
unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us
the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either
end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism
what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they
wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was
gone.
It is also part of a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an
idealized reality. The fashion industry has apparently known this for
years: Esquire magazine recently found that men's jeans from a variety
of name-brand manufacturers are cut large but labeled small. The actual
waist sizes are anywhere from three to six inches roomier than their
labels insist.
Perhaps it doesn't matter that we are being flattered into believing
what any full-length mirror can tell us is untrue. But when our
accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell
us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we
are headed for disaster. We need only look at our housing industry, our
credit card debt, the cost of two wars subsidized by borrowed money, and
the rising deficit to understand the dangers of entitlement run
rampant. We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What
we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at
the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to
present those facts without fear or favor.
To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years
ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives
were afraid that a failure to work in the "public interest, convenience
and necessity," as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the
Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their
licenses. The three major broadcast networks pointed to their news
divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence
that they were fulfilling the FCC's mandate. News was, in a manner of
speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the
enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.
On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the
network brass that news programming could be profitable.
Until, that is, CBS News unveiled its "60 Minutes" news magazine in
1968. When, after three years or so, "60 Minutes" turned a profit
(something no television news program had previously achieved), a light
went on, and the news divisions of all three networks came to be seen as
profit centers, with all the expectations that entailed.
I recall a Washington meeting many years later at which Michael Eisner,
then the chief executive of Disney, ABC's parent company, took questions
from a group of ABC News correspondents and compared our status in the
corporate structure to that of the Disney artists who create the
company's world-famous cartoons. (He clearly and sincerely intended the
analogy to flatter us.) Even they, Eisner pointed out, were expected to
make budget cuts; we would have to do the same.
I mentioned several names to Eisner and asked if he recognized any. He
did not. They were, I said, ABC correspondents and cameramen who had
been killed or wounded while on assignment. While appreciating the
enormous talent of the corporation's cartoonists, I pointed out that
working on a television crew, covering wars, revolutions and natural
disasters, was different. The suggestion was not well received.
The parent companies of all three networks would ultimately find a
common way of dealing with the risk and expense inherent in operating
news bureaus around the world: They would eliminate them. Peter Jennings
and I, who joined ABC News within a year of each other in the early
1960s, were profoundly influenced by our years as foreign
correspondents. When we became the anchors and managing editors of our
respective programs, we tried to make sure foreign news remained a major
ingredient. It was a struggle.
Peter called me one afternoon in the mid-'90s to ask whether we at
"Nightline" had been receiving the same inquiries that he and his
producers were getting at "World News Tonight." We had, indeed, been
getting calls from company bean-counters wanting to know how many times
our program had used a given overseas bureau in the preceding year. This
data in hand, the accountants constructed the simplest of equations:
Divide the cost of running a bureau by the number of television segments
it produced. The cost, inevitably, was deemed too high to justify
leaving the bureau as it was. Trims led to cuts and, in most cases, to
elimination.
The networks say they still maintain bureaus around the world, but
whereas in the 1960s I was one of 20 to 30 correspondents working out of
fully staffed offices in more than a dozen major capitals, for the most
part, a "bureau" now is just a local fixer who speaks English and can
facilitate the work of a visiting producer or a correspondent in from
London.
Much of the American public used to gather before the electronic hearth
every evening, separate but together, while Walter Cronkite, Chet
Huntley, David Brinkley, Frank Reynolds and Howard K. Smith offered
relatively unbiased accounts of information that their respective news
organizations believed the public needed to know. The ritual permitted,
and perhaps encouraged, shared perceptions and even the possibility of
compromise among those who disagreed.
It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters
were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn't know
that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple
yet.
The transition of news from a public service to a profitable commodity
is irreversible. Legions of new media present a vista of unrelenting
competition. Advertisers crave young viewers, and these young viewers
are deemed to be uninterested in hard news, especially hard news from
abroad. This is felicitous, since covering overseas news is very
expensive. On the other hand, the appetite for strongly held, if
unsubstantiated, opinion is demonstrably high. And such talk, as they
say, is cheap.
Broadcast news has been outflanked and will soon be overtaken by scores
of other media options. The need for clear, objective reporting in a
world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and
global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been.
But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful
of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of
consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.
As you may know, Olbermann returned to his MSNBC program after just two
days of enforced absence. (Given cable television's short attention
span, two days may well have seemed like an "indefinite suspension.") He
was gracious about the whole thing, acknowledging at least the
historical merit of the rule he had broken: "It's not a stupid rule," he
said. "It needs to be adapted to the realities of 21st-century
journalism."
There is, after all, not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism
will be adapted to conform with the old rules. Technology and the market
are offering a tantalizing array of channels, each designed to fill a
particular niche - sports, weather, cooking, religion - and an infinite
variety of news, prepared and seasoned to reflect our taste, just the
way we like it. As someone used to say in a bygone era, "That's the way
it is."
Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for "BBC World News America."
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